Inside the Star

Make of it what you will

"Nothing to Declare," the Power Plant's new exhibition of "current sculpture from Canada," as it says, covers a lot of ground. Most of it Canadian, though with the occasional escape – to Dublin, Berlin, Beijing and Montreal (whoops – my bad) – there might be some cross-border, customs-clearing sense to be gleaned from the show's blasé-seeming title. Have you ever met an artist with nothing to declare? One can only imagine how thrilling that would be.

"Nothing to Declare," the Power Plant's new exhibition of "current sculpture from Canada," as it says, covers a lot of ground. Most of it Canadian, though with the occasional escape – to Dublin, Berlin, Beijing and Montreal (whoops – my bad) – there might be some cross-border, customs-clearing sense to be gleaned from the show's blasé-seeming title. Have you ever met an artist with nothing to declare? One can only imagine how thrilling that would be.

But people in glass houses should keep their stones to themselves, I suppose, and we in the newspaper business know all too well the struggle of reflecting a complex set of ideas under a single heading – just scan some headlines sometime. That said, "Nothing to Declare" has quite a lot to say, actually, about form, material and current sculptural practice, and particularly thrillingly, how vital and alive it is right here on the home front.

I didn't think this could surprise me, the strength of "Nothing to Declare" lies in discoveries I thought myself long-past.

This is partly because of the installation – it's loose, cavernous, breezy and undirected; on purpose or not, I don't know – and partly because much of the work is either by younger artists, and so new – much of it from the last year or so – that even the senior artists present here, like Vancouver's Liz Magor, seem fresh.

I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with Magor's work – pieces that rendered the cast-off and workaday in hyper-real polymer always struck me as a clever reversal of the value proposition between art and junk; her giant tree trunks similarly rendered, not so much – but here, amid a collection of very few peers, there's a satisfying sense of continuum.

Magor's Stack of Trays, 2008, which is pretty much just that, carry a bizarre array of cast-offs; broken mickey bottles, Chiclets, paper cupcake liners, a chunk of wall, an enormous, withered rat carcass. That must have been a hell of a party. As with all her best work, Magor casts in a sort of amber the specimens of an aftermath, and leaves the backstory to us.

A lot of the work here has more formal concerns, though, material and method usurping narrative in ways both mysterious, sublime and occasionally hilarious. New to me was Brendan Tang's work, which fuses traditional Chinese porcelain techniques and an almost consumptive-seeming infiltration of hyper-modern Asian cultural phenomenon like Manga. In the best piece, a Ming urn, with its delicate blue figure painting, swells and bursts from inside as cartoonish mechanized appendages push to the surface – an engine, I think, and maybe some kind of rotor. Either way, it's a mysteriously creepy, engaging, if somewhat obvious polemic, and I was struck by it.

Remember that idea of continuum? One of my favourite newcomers of the past year has been Kerri Reid. Tirelessly playful but rigorous about method, craft and concept, Reid shows work here that both draws and departs from Magor's practice all at once.

On a sky-blue plinth in the gallery sit a grid of 100 identically broken porcelain cups, crumpled and cast just-so. There's an antecedent here: In 1975, Dutch designer Rob Brandt took a partially crushed Dixie cup and cast it in porcelain, then mass-produced his deliberately imperfect hand-wrought copy as, one would guess, a statement on disposable culture and the loss of the handmade.

Reid calls it Things Fall Apart, (2009), and here, she takes Brandt’s cup, broken, as it is, and further jimmies the toggle between valued object and disposable junk. Reid’s shattered Brandts, exactingly reproduced, drag the Dixie cup’s non-value proposition ever-higher, from throwaway through collectable and into the realm of art — where, ironically, utility surrenders to aesthetic value: You can’t use a broken cup, but you can contemplate its trajectory from trash to the sublime.

There’s the gulf between the manufactured and hand-wrought, which Reid also extends, somewhat obsessively, in the painstaking reproduction of the random moment of accident. Reid’s act here is undeniably, cheekily precious, in every sense, which is of course a large part of the greater whole; at the same time, the installation of the grid is seductive and enthralling, marrying idea and craft in a perfect, holistic package.

Giving “Nothing to Declare” — the title, not the content — a little more due, we can parse that curator Helena Reckitt was working with the idea of artists using prosaic materials — the “nothing” part, I’m guessing — to render the sublime. This is an old, Modern notion of sculpture, stretching back through anti-object movements like Dada — R. Mutt/Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal — and its later iteration in early conceptualist sculptors like Dan Flavin, who, after the show ended, returned fluorescent tubes used in his sculptures to the hardware store. That’s not the practice here, but the entanglement with workaday material, and their dictates on form, very much are.

James Carl, a Toronto sculptor who studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, shows here a huge, airy sculpture from his Jalousie series, woven with varying lengths and colours of vinyl venetian blinds (here, the dominant shade yields the piece’s name: Pink, 2009). Last year, he told me the wrestle with the blinds meant the finished product, anthropomorphic and primal-seeming, would often be a collaborative effort between artist and material — a Modern idea if there ever was one.

Plenty more here is worth your time. Luanne Martineau’s hysterically involved yarn works evoke an impossible-seeming fusion between cartoon gore and homespun craft (one piece, Hanger (2008), seems to be a knit version of entrails — how cozy) and in their alarmingly, hilariously repulsive form never disappoint. Montreal’s Valerie Blass, a fast-emerging sensation, has three pieces here, each confounding and creepily seductive, though L’homme souci, (2009) an armless burl of black hair extensions stood up straight in a pair of Miu Miu’s takes the prize.

Kara Uzelman’s compelling fusions of castoffs make for engaging puzzlement, none more so than her Magnetic Stalactite, a junky agglomeration of tinny bits — a trash can, wisk, cans, pots — suspended from the ceiling. Uzelman’s rough assemblages, coupled with a bit of backstory effectively evoke an eerie sense of the deluded loner; the pieces are seem jerry-rigged, precarious, possibly dangerous. But the objects themselves don’t live without the accompanying mythology, and in that sense, mildly disappoint.

But I suppose if anyone really cared what I said I could drop it in the suggestion box installed at the show’s entrance by Gareth Moore. Moore, it says here, “works in the tradition of a journeyman/storyteller;” in January, he’ll spend three weeks here doing his best to accommodate.

So, everyone’s a critic. Moore provides paper and pencil. Give it a shot.

Nothing to Declare runs until March 2010 at 231 Queens Quay W.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.